These are extremely important terms to understand. There are two ways that the United States Department of Transportation allow movers to price their services. The first is a binding estimate. That means that the price is (theoretically – more on this in a moment) fixed and will not go up on move day. Non-binding estimates are based on the weight of your things and they can go up drastically on move day because you really have no way to know what your things weigh.

This is another common ‘gotcha’ in the moving industry. Most full service movers will include at the minimum the use of moving blankets and pads. This is the standard that we hold to as well. However, some items require special packing – TV sets, mirrors, glass furniture all require more than just the standard moving blankets to make sure they don’t break along the way. Upholstered furniture and mattresses also require special packing with plastic wrap for hygienic reasons. You can do it yourself and save some money and we can send you a guide to how to do it or you can us to do it for you. Either way, we’ll let you know what needs additional packing and will never simply let you figure it out on your own.

This is a tricky one – many people have heard that they need to look for a binding estimate. That means that the mover has a list of items that they are expected to move and as long as the list is accurate, the price stays the same. However, some movers call their estimates ‘binding based on CF’ or they simply call it a ‘binding estimate’ without specifying what that means. In essence, that’s another version of a non-binding estimate – if your things take up more cubic feet than the estimate says they do (and they usually will), your price goes up. Always insist on a contract that says ‘price is binding based on inventory.’

This is another practice we’ve seen some shadier movers using. They put down a discount of around 60-70% on their ‘tariff’ rate. That makes it sound like you got a huge discount. However, we’ve found that in almost every case, when a mover does that, they are doing a non-binding estimate based on CF (see above). This way, when your move exceeds the cubic feet listed, they can charge you for the difference at the full tariff rate (i.e. around 60-70% more than you would expect to pay for the difference).

If the fuel surcharge is relatively small, around 3-6%, you can generally feel okay with it being there. However, some movers use the fuel surcharge to inflate their pricing while keeping their rate per cubic foot low to make it sound good. They’ll sometimes have rates as high as 15-20% in order to make their price per cubic foot appear lower.

If you want to make sure that a mover is being honest, you want to compare the cubic feet they list. It’s okay if a mover lists around 10-20 cubic feet less or more because they may be putting in slightly different numbers (if something comes to 1.95CF, some just round up to 2 and others go with the more exact total). However, if there is a difference of hundreds of CF, something is off and you’re going to have trouble on move day.